The Last Highlander (29 page)

Fraser of Castleleathers continued to bait his Lordship. ‘The known notorious common liar and monster of ingratitude, Major Cracks,’ came to Inverness, Lovat told Grant in the spring of 1737. Castleleathers boasted that he had informed against Lovat to Ilay. No wonder Lovat made no headway. ‘It is the greatest trial that ever my patience met with, that I do not yield to my just passion in allowing his nose and ears to be cut off,’ Lovat snapped. Perhaps Grant might plead for his beleaguered brother-in-law. ‘Vindicate me against the lies of a rodomontade villain!’ with the Earl, he implored. Grant declined, thereby avoiding his terrifyingly energetic Fraser brother-in-law.

Lovat tried to distract Ilay by reporting how well he served as the face of British law and order in his role as Sheriff and commander of an Independent Company. No one disputed that. He avoided mentioning what Wade, Forbes and Ilay thought was his other face – the intriguer with spies from the Stuart Court at Rome. The ghost of old charges of Jacobitism, conspiracy and treason haunted his letters to Ilay.

Grant sensed a change in his brother-in-law’s mood. From remorselessly vigorous requests and plots to get places, Lovat seemed more reflective. He thought all his problems flowed from Duncan Forbes who, he maintained, hated him. Grant countered that this was simply not true. Lovat went out of his way to abandon the Forbeses, after they helped him so much when he first returned, and after they had laboured for years over his various lawsuits. Lovat’s virulent opposition in the last election upset Duncan profoundly, but the Lord President still admired Lovat’s skill and authority in regulating a balance of power among his neighbouring chiefs. As a Highlander, Duncan liked and understood Lovat and his values. As a Briton, he could not.

As 1737 drew to a close, Lovat put a very basic question to Ilay: Would the Earl do anything at all, make any gesture, to stop him doing something irreversible? If Ilay gave him trifles to let him hope, then Lovat would see ‘no further difficulty in life’ than to ‘live frugally in order to pay the great debt I owe for that natural and beloved acquisition of mine, which has cost me above thirty years’ purchase … An Arabian would have got it cheaper than I,’ he noted. The price of his estates could also be summed up in lost decades of his life, as well as a fortune in legal costs and compensation. When he set out on this path in 1715, he assumed his inheritance would simply be assigned to him after a few years of proving himself in the courts.

Lovat failed to reach Ilay; whether it was Lord President Forbes who blocked him, or Ilay’s elected deafness, it was no matter. A year later, Lovat, the British government employee, swore his oaths of allegiance to King George II. Then he travelled to Edinburgh on business, and to arrange his boys’ education. While there he put down a marker of his independence and dissatisfaction with his treatment. In an age of clubs, establishment and dissenting, the problem with the one Lovat now joined – as a founder member – was the purpose declared in its name: The Association for the Restoration of the Stuarts. ‘I was one of those that entered into a formal association to venture our lives and fortunes to restore the King [‘James III and VIII’] and his offspring, and we signed our mutual engagements for this purpose with our hands and seals,’ Lovat said later. Lovat was the head of it. With him were Sir James Campbell of Auchinbreck, Cameron of Lochiel the younger, John Roy Stuart, the Earl of Traquair, Lord Perth and his brother, Lord John Drummond. Seven noblemen expressed treason. Soon others joined them.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Floating between interests, 1738–43

‘I have a clean conscience and an upright heart’

– LOVAT, ABOUT HIMSELF

The members of the Association for the Restoration of the Stuarts met regularly in Edinburgh to air grievances about the government and its policies. Drummond of Balhaldie – an agent running information between France, the Stuart Court in Rome, and Great Britain – was one of their main contacts. He was an active Jacobite and close friend of John Roy Stuart. As Lovat pulled away from his friends in government, Forbes and Wade wondered, and shared their speculation with Ilay, just how many of Lovat’s intimates were active Jacobites. Balhaldies, John Roy Stuart, various Erskines of Mar, members of the Perth family, Gordons along the coast east from Inverness towards Aberdeen, Camerons of Lochiel – these rocks formed the foundations of Jacobitism in Scotland.

When Balhaldie’s brother died of fever in the West Indies, where he had been a sugar planter, Lovat commiserated but begged Balhaldie not to pursue his plan to go abroad and take up his brother’s work. ‘Fix your heart upon your home affairs, and wait patiently some happy occasion in which you can show your merit and valour for the honour and glory of your country, and how heroic and glorious it is to venture your person for your dear country, rather than for the sordid dross of the earth, which is as difficult and uncertain to preserve, as it is painful and tormenting to acquire.’ Lovat’s letters reeked of clannishness, Scottish nationalism, the semi-biblical glamour of fighting for Jacobitism – and treason.

His letters to his friends recounted exhausting socialising at Castle Dounie, trips to Edinburgh, chatter about the boys and whether or not to buy paintings. When a portrait of William Wallace came on the market in Edinburgh, he wanted it but, given his huge debt obligations, his advisers told him he just did not have enough cash. ‘Pray tell Evan Baillie,’ his business manager, ‘that I yielded my resolution of purchasing Sir William Wallace’s picture’ – Lovat felt a pang – ‘for I always loved to preserve the glory and honour of old and ancient families.’ It was his life’s work. The portrait spoke to him like a picture of any hero. Wallace represented victory, Scottish independence, unflinching resistance to English colonialism, all themes at different times in his life. The painting excited and uplifted him. His ancestor had also died in the Wars of Independence. They were connected in spirit and through history.

Other letters contained messages from his hidden world, where a group of high-born sleeping traitors had banded together, and waited for what might happen. The club was an outlet for their frustrations with the Union and Britishness, and for their personal grievances after they were passed over for jobs and pensions.

As the 1730s drew to a close, a lot went wrong at once for Lovat. After a political campaign that had cost him dear in terms of money and important friends, he had been overlooked by the new administration when it had come to handing out perks after the election. Now, returning home to Dounie he was confronted by Lady Lovat. She demanded a separation.

Primrose had given him another son, Archie, who was now eighteen months old. ‘My Lady Lovat, whose head was never right,’ in Lovat’s view, ‘turned entirely wrong.’ She looked more like a ‘mad woman’ than one of ‘common sense and religion’. She complained of his frugality and lack of attention. Lovat thought it was ‘mad’ that she did not want to cut her dress from the mothy shroud of her predecessor’s garment. On her side, she had not made this home or this family. It was a borrowed life. Lovat was too set in his ways, and too old, to build an intimate union with a young woman barely into her twenties. She had been dropped into a world of wheeling and dealing, unfinished business at home and abroad, flirting with treason, speaking loyalty and disloyalty. She was supposed to fit in with this man of twists and turns. If Lovat found biddable women in Amelia Murray and Margaret Grant, he could not dominate Primrose – so they had fought.

Lovat’s chaplain, his baillie and Mr Donald, the boys’ tutor, overheard the rows and tried to persuade Lady Lovat that her place was in the family, as chatelaine of the clan and Fraser country. She cried that she wanted to see her mother. She needed money and asked for £50. Lovat retorted she could have what she wanted from his chamberlain, as long as she made an account of its use ‘for the good and service of the family’. She screamed that she had brought a good dowry and wanted an allowance she need not account for – for feminine things – ‘clothes, drugs and any other little necessaries that she thought fit’. He scratched his head. ‘This is most horrid and puts me to the four corners of my saddle to consider what to do.’ He intercepted ‘things’ that she ‘was sending to her mother, with some guineas’. He let the gold guineas go, but kept the Fraser items, including a silk tabard he bought years ago as a christening gown for his daughter Jenny.

The domestic carnage did neither of them any good. You have an ‘angel for a wife’, Lovat congratulated his nephew Ludovick Grant, Sir James’s son and heir, where he had ‘a mixture of a devil and a [jack]daw’ – a thieving bird. He complained it was hard to have money extorted from him, so she could go ‘south … making a noise and racket among her relations’ about his cruelty. Primrose refused to be reconciled to the marriage, and he agreed to give her her independence, though she stayed at Dounie for a while. Lovat asked three household officers to ‘cut and carve upon it’, ready to ‘do anything for peace sake, and to hinder my name and character to be maliciously tossed up and down’ and his private life made ‘the table-talk of the country’.

Despite the tensions, Lovat was ‘almost overwhelmed with company’. Every day, the servants set up ‘two tables and above twenty covers … My whole time is taken up, so that I have not a minute to myself’ to think where this was all leading and attend to his clan business, Lovat wrote. He loved the networking and hosting, the feeling his home was the hub of the Highland world of the clans, though. Chiefs and lairds, ‘Mackintosh, Drynie, Redcastle and other gentlemen and seven or eight ladies’ stayed for weeks, demanding food, entertainment and beds. He knew Wade watched him for a reason to break Lovat’s company. This socialising caught his attention.

When his guests left at last, Lovat succumbed to low spirits and ‘a very strong roving fever, with a violent cough’. He forced down ‘several vomits and doses of rhubarb’. The distemper raged, his body heaving with ‘a violent vomiting and purging at the same time’. After such a brutal evacuation, he improved. Lady Lovat heard and her stomach tightened. It was all she could do to hold herself still until she could escape his fortress. Soon enough the day came and she left, leaving her husband a single parent again – in his seventies, organising the clan, his home and raising five children, aged between eighteen months and twelve years.

Being Lovat, he applied his whole attention everywhere, questioning school masters, querying shopkeepers’ accounts, ordering supplies daily for the household. ‘I have as good Skill myself of Housekeeping as any in the Island,’ he boasted. He sent instructions to his Inverness merchant when ‘wee Sandy’ was ready to be ‘breeched’ out of nursery pinafores. John Young, ‘general of our tailors’, will come, he said, ‘to take off clothes for my little boy Sandy … I hope his periwig is now ready … and a little hat for him. It must not be very little for he has a good large head of his age.’ He was only nine, but already a Highland gentleman, all ‘furniture conform’, ‘periwig’ and all.

Then he drove with his beloved Sandy, smart and itchy in his new suit, to put the boy to live with his older cousin Ludo Grant, to see if a break from Dounie might calm the boy’s coarse tongue and appetites. The child, unmothered at birth, and then badly mothered, was always a worry to his father. Even now he was very hard to control. On the way, Lovat reflected that if Margaret had been alive, she would have shouldered the burden for loving and teaching their children and tending their illnesses, and controlling the many keys to the stores of a large household, all hanging in a noisy ‘chatelaine’ from her belt. He felt agitated in his heart. He collected Simon and dropped the boy in Glasgow before going on to Edinburgh, instructing the lad to make sure his handwriting was firm and clear and to keep speaking Gaelic. To placate Ilay, Lovat had agreed to put the Master of Lovat with a Campbell minister in Glasgow instead of in Edinburgh, where he and his Jacobite friends had houses.

From Edinburgh, Lovat wrote to Mr Donald who had temporary management of the household at Dounie, to say he hoped to be home ‘in five or six weeks if I am alive and in health’. Until he arrived, ‘you will be so good as to keep all the keys of the house, the key of my closet where my strong box is, the key of the press [cupboard] in my room’, and so on. ‘Little Hughy will have the key of the meat cellar and act as butler till I send home one, and after you take an inventory of what is in the press and little cellar he may get the keys of that too.’ When the mutton was eaten up, they should ask for a few hens. ‘Hugh Papa will give you [oat]meal and salmon, and John Fraser’s wife will send you out grey fish from the town. In short you must have two good substantial dishes when you are alone and three dishes when you have any strangers. Drink as much of the fine ale as you have a mind and when there comes an extraordinary stranger you may give him a bottle of wine. I shall leave instructions with Hugh Papa how to manage the second table.’ Tired, he put down his pen and flexed his fingers. If only he had a wife, this would so much less of a burden. But he never stopped, and picked up his pen again as soon as he could.

What concerned Lovat particularly in 1740 were the first reports of the harvest. It was already July. He prayed to God this year would be better than the last. In 1739 the harvest had failed. Some of his ‘commons’ were in very poor health, and malnourished. From Edinburgh he wrote constantly to his estate factors, asking for updates: ‘I am exceeding glad of the account you give me of the corns.’ It promised to be an abundant year. ‘We should thank God that the poor people will have bread … As the harvest must be late, the poor people cannot expect a relief from it for three or four weeks, so that now is the time to be charitable towards them … I find that the spates and the floods in the river this year has wronged my fishing very much, there is no help for it, we should thank God for what we have.

‘I am glad you tell me that the hay of Tomich is cared for, but you say nothing of the hay of Lovat, and I am sure it is very good condition before this time …

‘I am glad that most of my peats are secured in the peat yard, and I hope no time will be lost to put in what remains when the weather will allow it …

‘I will have all the stones that are landed at Dumballach carried near the old castle …’ Lovat’s chamberlain knew ‘better than I do how to manage those rascals the waggoners’. Meantime, he requested them to send south his two cash books ‘since I know not what I have paid or what I am owing in this town’.

Back at Dounie he watched for Duncan Forbes’s movements, asking one of his Inverness contacts if he knew when the Lord President was coming to his estate of Bunchrew and Achnagairn; whether he would go to dine at Brahan (the Mackenzie stronghold); so ‘that my posts may be in good order as he passes’. He needed to keep everything looking as Duncan should see it, without too many Jacobites spotted, coming and going through Fraser country.

When he relaxed back in his carriage and looked about him though, despite some setbacks and failures, Lovat could congratulate himself. He had largely fulfilled the quest given to young Simon Fraser of Beaufort by men like the Reverend James. Taking stock of his achievements old Lovat wrote: ‘I have done my part to my family, children and kindred, and I am easy about all the actions of all the great men of Britain. I shall live well with my allies and neighbours, and never desire to have to do with any public people or affairs. I am quite tired of them … but I must have patience till the debt of the estate of Lovat be paid.’ His real difficulty meeting everyday expenses was the huge call on his resources caused by having to pay off Fraserdale.

The Master of Lovat’s time in Glasgow did not last. Lovat said the Campbell minister charged extortionately for the boy’s board and schooling, and so he moved Simon to Edinburgh as soon as he could. Lovat drove himself as hard as ever. The children took up a lot of his time and thoughts. A child of Simon’s social standing needed a footman. ‘I thought William Chisholm was a very fit handsome fellow for him,’ Lovat said to Mr Donald, whom he sent to run the boy’s household in the city, but ‘I know his design is to have little Simon McQuian that used to serve him in this house, and I will humour him in that.’ Also, ‘I think riding out once a week would be good for his health, but you must make a frugal bargain for horses.’